Reimagining Community Youth Sport Events: Relational Lessons from the Arctic Winter Games

Abstract

This thesis examines the Arctic Winter Games (AWG) as a community youth sport event that offers important lessons for reimagining such events around relationality. While sport events are often evaluated through economic, competitive, or performance-oriented outcomes, this thesis shifts attention to their relational significance. It asks how the AWG creates conditions for meaningful relational experiences, what kinds of relational encounters participants describe during and after the event, and what this case can teach us about the social possibilities of community youth sport events.

Drawing on qualitative secondary data analysis, this thesis analyzes materials from two broader research projects on the AWG, including interviews, open-ended survey responses, organizational documents, and observation notes. The analysis is primarily informed by Hartmut Rosa's theory of resonance and Victor Turner's concepts of liminoid and communitas, along with related concepts of relationality. Together, these theoretical perspectives allow the thesis to examine not only how significant relationships emerge during the AWG, but also how particular event conditions may increase the possibility of meaningful relational encounters.

Across three article-based analysis, this thesis develops a layered understanding of relationality in the AWG. The first article examines the AWG as a potential space of social resonance, showing how organizational, spatial, temporal, and psychological conditions can support meaningful connection while also illustrating key elements of resonance, such as affection and response, and its preconditions, such as openness and curiosity. The second article considers the pressures that may inhibit resonance in youth sport events, including hyper-competition, sportification, and instrumental rationality, while showing how the AWG may soften these pressures. The third article explores the AWG as a liminoid configuration in which participants experience various forms of relationality, including friendship, networking, belonging, emotional and cultural resonance, enchantment, communitas, and continued involvement after the Games.

Taken together, this thesis argues that the AWG can be understood not simply as a youth sport competition, but as an illustrative case for reimagining community youth sport events around relationality. Its significance lies less in producing relationships automatically than in showing how a community-oriented philosophy, sociocultural programming, festive atmosphere, emphasis on northern and Indigenous values, and broader developmental values can create conditions in which relational encounters become more likely.